Rating: 
Summary: A Decent Book that Could've Been Better
Review: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is an odd piece of fiction. Barnes makes some of it a very interesting read. Unfortunately, too much of the novel comes across as boring or preachy, including the half-chapter which is supposed to contain one of the main themes of the book. The first two chapters, The Stowaway and The Visitors, are both excellent. The third chapter breaks the momentum that Barnes had been building up, but The Survivor, chapter 4, picks things up again. It goes into a tailspin from there. Shipwreck and The Mountain are both incredibly tough to read (Shipwreck seems especially out of place after reading the four previous chapters). Three Simple Stories and Upstream! are almost as entertaining as the first two chapters, but the half-chapter, Parenthesis, sounds like it belongs in a coffee bar. It tries to understand love, something that cannot be completely understood. This chapter tries to tie the entire novel together, but it doesn't quite work. Simply put, Barnes gets to the point too late. Project Ararat isn't very interesting, but The Dream ends the novel with a decent story. However, it's too little, too late. It's worth picking up this book to read the stories that are entertaining. They all can stand on their own and are definitely worth reading. However, the stories are not tied together well, and it is in this respect that the novel falls apart.
Rating: 
Summary: Separating the clean from the unclean
Review: Barnes' brilliant History of the World offers little comfort to the reader even though it is bitingly satirical in tone. Barnes' ten and a half chapters are really a series of stories that reflect various places, peoples, and time periods. There is no chronology to these events: indeed, Barnes' look at history need not be chronological as history constantly repeats itself. Each story is connected by recurring themes: separating the clean from the unclean, the presence of woodworm, the importance of Noah's ark, and,in most cases, the maritime setting. Barnes shows the human race doing itself in on countless occasions. Humanity is a perplexing idea: human beings, demonstrates Barnes, have both the ability to love and the ability to annihilate each other. There is a richness in the interpretation of history (as demonstrated in the chapter "Shipwreck") but there is also danger. Man too often rewrites history, bodlerizes it, cleans it up. This may lend to the repetition of man's folly. Religion and reverence are also placed on the table in "History." Barnes shows how religious belief often becomes a tool to separate oneself from the rest. The humorousness of Barnes' "History" is one of its most enduring features. Its ruthlessness separates itself from traditional history books. Its strong prose and unique style separate it from the common rut of fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: an eclectic, fragmented, difficult novel - worth reading
Review: Consisting of ten chapters related in theme but not in character, setting, or plot, this novel challenges the bounds of its genre. Its component chapters purport to tell a brief history of human triumph and failure, love, and war; the egotistical tone and the lack of a single coherent, engrossing story make the book a challenge to read and to like. But each chapter is its own microcosm, each telling a story of faith or doubt, love or futility, in its own time and scope, and each written in a unique style (so any reader is bound to enjoy at least part of the book). The book as a whole is well worth the effort of reading its more tedious chapters: it is more interesting, intelligent, and inspiring than the sum of its parts, and the various stories all seem to belong together. While this book is not an engaging read, it is an intellectual adventure.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: I am an avid reader with no devotion to any particular genre or author. I read "History" on a recommendation from a friend whose taste I trusted, and I was so pleased that I've read it twice over again in a matter of 3 weeks (more or less - I read certain chapters multiple times, others only once). Even if you have no shortage of self-awareness and literary competence, this book will make you feel noticeably improved in those areas. I couldn't be happier that this book found its way to me.
Rating:
Summary: A creative analysis of the human condition.
Review: I could recommend this book because of the creative devices used to convey Barnes's message, or because of the message itself (that humanity perpetuates an endless cycle of self-destruction), or because of the amazing forethought presented by a young writer, or because of the tenderness with which he approaches his subject (that's us). But I won't choose; I'll recommend it for all of these reasons. The comparisons to Joyce and Calvino (on the back cover) are apt, except Barnes is more compassionate than Joyce and less cryptic than Calvino. Barnes is a Boccaccio for our times. It's rare that I find a philosophical novel to be so compelling. Buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Woodworms of Time
Review: In _A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters_, Julian Barnes takes the tired cliché, "history repeats itself," and breathes new life into the phrase. By plopping the reader down in various fictional and historical situations ranging from the voyage of Noah's ark, to the wreck of the Medusa, to the South American set of a British movie, Barnes shows us that history does indeed repeat itself, often in inimical ways. The result is a fantastic and thought provoking novel reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon's masterful mingling of fact and fiction.
Barnes focuses specifically on the inimical historical practice of separating the clean from the unclean and shows us how this act plays itself out from various historical and social angles. The book begins with an account of Noah's ark narrated by a stowaway woodworm with a good sense of humor who describes to us God and Noah's separation of clean and unclean beasts. Disturbed laughter at the woodworm's lament on the "puzzled complaint of the lobster" and the "mournful shame of the stork" (11) turns to creeping horror in the next chapter as a boat full of tourists is hijacked by terrorists. Here, the terrorists separate the tourists (who, incidentally, are on the cruise to learn about history) first by nationality and then by religious affiliation. Later, Barnes spares no details in his powerfully terse description of the shipwreck of the Medusa, yet another situation where passengers of a ship are divided into groups by status. Officers escape in lifeboats as other crewmembers are left to murder and cannibalize on a makeshift raft. Barnes' description of these events can elicit a dry laugh at one moment and disgusted outrage at the next.
The novel's explanation for all of these universal injustices: entropy, the ineluctable tendency of all things tangible and intangible to evolve towards a state of disorganization. Or as Barnes defines it: "things f@*k up" (244). Pynchon would be proud of Barnes' use of woodworms as a motif to represent entropy throughout history, but like Pynchon Barnes believes in the saving grace of humane gestures. Just when things begin to look really bleak, the author breaks in with his own voice in "Parenthesis," the half-chapter of _A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters_ and in this critic's opinion, one of the greatest treatises on love ever written. The chapter expounds on the human force of love, a historical factor that probably did not appear in your History of Western Civilization book.
Hilarious, unsettling and touching, Julian Barnes' _A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters_ is recommend to all those who may have lost their faith in the universe or those who are looking for an intelligent play on everything they have ever been taught. Bring an open mind and plenty of time to think over some fascinating issues and you will not be disappointed with this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Fiction
Review: Many have said in these reviews that the fragmented nature of this book make it a difficult read. I found it the opposite...the different settings, tones, styles, and characters in each chapter made the book a dynamic experience, and the way Barnes takes two or three main themes and weaves them so effortlessly throughout all of the chapters is incredible. I found the book a joy to read, never knowing when a little nugget from a previous chapter would pop up in another chapter/story in some totally unexpected way. The "history of the world" obviously isn't linear or traditional, but it's a fun exploration of themes, emotions, and trends that Barnes sees as common throughout history. Great read.
Rating:
Summary: Makes you think
Review: Some people have said that this book is an intellectual read. It is, but its also very readable. The author has a fantastic sense of humour, and if you only read the chapter on Noahs Ark, you're in for a real treat. Other chapters are a little more hardgoing, but its worth it. Barnes takes myths, stories, paintings and so on as his inspiration and builds on them, adding a really human element to things which are otherwise hard to imagine. It makes you think, but not in an overly challenging way!
Rating:
Summary: A Fictional Non-Fiction Novelty
Review: The novelty inherent in Julian Barnes� A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters is�in part�that it is not really a �novel.� It is more of a comically tragic reminiscence of Joyce�s Dubliners than your standard long-prose work, complete with protagonist, antagonist, and the typical one-plot, one setting structure. Its 10 ½ stories bluntly give us a non-revisionist�s history of the world by traveling from a tale of �unclean� woodworm stowaways upon Noah�s Ark to Barnes� conception of Heaven. It is realist and fantastic at once, telling how it was, is, and is to be with such honesty, depth, and sensitivity that its classification should be a sort of jocular Capotesque non-fiction novel.
A History of the World�s most curious feature is its division. Ten strikingly different stories and one half-chapter side-note are seem as if they are randomly slapped together until the reader starts to make the connections. The woodworms stowed away on the Ark are in a subsequent chapter tried for the destruction of church property and blasphemous offence against God when their progeny take residence in and consume the Catholic cathedral of Mamirolle. The trial sings with critique of man�s distortion of the religious impulse and social commentary. The Ark comes up in nearly every chapter, establishing a sort of nautical theme tied together with the wreck of the Medusa, a 17th century French naval frigate and the theories of the modern human�s ascent from the sea from an amphibious state. Barnes also maintains a religious theme throughout the work, adding a discussion of Jonah in the whale, a timely leap into Middle Eastern religion turned politics, and a philosophical treatise on the meaning and purpose of heaven. All of this is weaved together to form a mystical collage of human nature and history.
As one might surmise from the title, the ½ chapter is of great importance to the unity of the narrative. Entitled �Parenthesis� these 19 pages of side note seem to be a larger version of the �aside� in which the author speaks directly to the reader. Barnes includes this personal commentary to reveal the main theme of the work: an exploration of love and its value for the human species. Love is the only tool we have to beat down the history of the world and make life plausible, give it some meaning.
History isn�t what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another�.And we the readers of history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it�s more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by decorator�s roller rather than camel-hair brush (240).
Because of the confusion of sentient existence, �Our random mutation [love] is essential because it is unnecessary.� (238) We don�t NEED it, that�s why it means something and how it empowers us.
Simply stated, Barnes� novel (alright, I admit, it is a novel�however NOVEL) wants us to be more conscious of what a blessing it is to be a sentient, thoughtful beings capable of reading novels. It wants us to not get tied up in �historical facts� and to realize that we can get more out of a fictional account of history which admits to this condition than from revisionist histories around the world that disguise themselves in FACT. Or maybe, it just wants us to read it and enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: History as Novel
Review: There are ten wonderful and oddly connected stories in this book, each told in a different voice and set in a different milieu. Each stands on its own as a provocative work, each with virtuoso narrative flow. Yet, as I read this book, I had the feeling that the stories, great as they are, don't really form a connected work. Then, in his chapter "Parenthesis", Barnes explains why. "The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. ...And while we fret and writhe... we make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history."
This idea about history is certainly true. But it does create a book, fine though it is, that doesn't build narrative power from chapter to chapter. This would be a serious flaw in a lesser writer. But with Barnes, my verdict is highly recommended.
|
